NONFICTION

Wheezy Trill

By Laura Grace Hitt     VOLUME 58 No. 4

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In kindergarten, Luke and I tried to lay eggs.

I struggle to recall what this feat involved. Did we squat over a straw nest and push? Did we sit down in the sandbox, close our eyes, and imagine the eggs we wanted to bring forth? Did we imitate the chickens in the coop at my house, whose clucking bodies we used to gently approach and nudge aside—slowly so we wouldn’t get pecked—for the warm secrets they guarded?

I know we broadcast our attempt at oviparity because it lives on in school lore, unforgettable to our fellow classmates, who liked to tease us about it when we were older. “Tried?” I used to respond. “How do you know we didn’t succeed?”

I remember that kindergarten playground with its piñon and juniper trees, including the snag known as Favorite Tree. It was white and smooth, completely denuded of bark, and covered with squiggly lines where insects had burrowed when the tree was still alive. It stood at the border between the kindergarten and the larger playground where the elementary and middle schoolers played, where Luke and I would be by each other’s side all the way until eighth grade.

Favorite was also a pet name that Luke bestowed on his friends with a wink, making us feel special and in competition for his attention. I like to think I was his favorite most of the time—and perhaps it was in Favorite Tree that we built our nest, gathered soft and pliable materials, and did our best to create something with wings.

When he died, I went back to that kindergarten playground, walked our old haunts. Favorite Tree was gone, so I said a prayer and buried a few rose petals beneath an old piñon tree.



Ash-throated Flycatcher
Song: musical ka-brick
Call: coach’s whistle—short and descending

Chris, our birding-by-ear teacher, stands on the trail, cupping his hands to his ears to make them bigger. “Deer ears,” he calls it, a goofy-looking but surprisingly effective technique for amplifying faraway sound. It’s chilly for spring, but his hat is pulled up above his ears, and his white hair ruffles in the breeze. We are on a birding trip to Leonora Curtin Wetland Preserve in La Cienega, a marshy area just south of Santa Fe. Chris has just taught us how to identify an Ash-throated Flycatcher by its call, which sounds like a coach’s whistle, a brief descending trill. The flycatcher, its pale yellow breast and square gray head subtle in the morning light, sits on a branch high up in a cottonwood tree that hasn’t fully leafed-out yet. Spring migration has recently brought these flycatchers up from Mexico and Central America, but if Chris hadn’t taught us how to recognize its call, we probably would have missed this bird entirely.

I am by far the youngest birder in this group, though I have been birding for fourteen years now. I was introduced to birding by my ecology professor in college and have never looked back. I couldn’t believe all the wildlife I had been missing, birds that were suddenly visible in intricate detail through a simple piece of equipment. I took my binoculars everywhere with me and was rewarded with tiny American Kestrels perched on power lines, adorable flocks of Bushtits flitting in the shrubs, and the massive silhouettes of Great Blue Herons flying high above.

I once had an almost psychedelic experience looking at a tiny Golden­crowned Kinglet, a small warbler with a plump, gray body and black and white facial markings. Its golden crown was raised, sparkling with a deep orangey sorbet, rich and iridescent. And then, for a fraction of a second, I saw a flash of bright green within all those warm colors, and I suddenly understood, viscerally, what it meant that birds can see colors beyond the spectrum visible to humans. While our eyes have three kinds of cone cells to detect color, birds have four. Their cone cells also contain tiny drops of colored oil, which act much like a filter on a camera lens and allow them to distinguish between colors that might look identical to humans. They can see ultraviolet and near ultraviolet, including colors that we can’t even imagine. I contemplated the vividness of their world—how the black of ravens probably wasn’t black at all.

Birding by ear takes identification to the next level and is both extremely frustrating and extremely fun. Chris is a master—at any given time he can identify dozens of birds around him just by listening to their songs and calls, everything from an intricate warble to a brief chip note or flight call. I am improving little by little and know about twenty-five vocalizations by now. It sometimes feels herculean because birds often have several different songs and calls. They also vary regionally, so a Spotted Towhee in Santa Fe doesn’t sound quite the same as one in Oregon. On a regular basis, I’m incredibly frustrated, and also inspired, that there’s so much to learn—it’s endless. For example, I thought I had American Robin memorized pretty well. They are widespread and vocal, and I know their lilting, pause-filled songs. However, Western Tanagers and Black-headed Grosbeaks have similar songs. Chris describes the Black-headed Grosbeak as sounding like a drunk robin or a robin reciting Shakespeare—it’s a little sloppier, a little goofier. And the Western Tanager sounds like a hoarse robin or a robin with a cold. Now that both these beautiful birds are here for the summer, I have to pause for every robin I hear and make sure it does not sound drunk or under the weather.

It’s conundrums like these that make my head hurt and also fill me with a giddy excitement. I could study vocalizations till the day I die, and hopefully I will. I see what a gift this is, especially since I learned about Luke’s death a few weeks ago.

He died in a car crash in Mexico. If I had known as a child that we would only get thirty-odd years together, would that have changed anything? Would I have tried harder to mend the friendship that had disintegrated in the last decade? I still see his curly auburn hair, his delicate lips grinning mischievously.

On my right thigh is a spangle of purple scars that belong to both of us. Luke and I were small, in kindergarten or first grade, but had known each other since preschool, where we had instantly bonded. We already had our own imaginary worlds of fairies, mythical creatures, and magic. We were playing at the house his parents were building, running around in what would become the garden, following a maze of winding paths, hidden benches, and little fountains. It was summer in Santa Fe, and the late afternoon heat beat down, bouncing off his red curls. I followed the blur of his freckled legs as he darted under juniper branches, through chamisa corridors.

Suddenly I was in the lead, running fast, rounding junipers at breakneck speed. As I pivoted around one, I looked back to see how close Luke was, and suddenly I was entangled in a giant cholla cactus, its great spiny arms reaching above my head. The right side of my body, especially my upper thigh, took the brunt of the impact and was embedded with spines. The pain was immediate. I couldn’t move. I stood there frozen, and Luke looked at me, the color draining from his face. “I’ll get my stepdad,” he said.

His parents came back with a pair of pliers, and I remember the humiliation of having to take off my shorts (Did they cut them off?) and standing there in my ladybug underwear while his stepdad, Michael, used the pliers to pick spines out of my leg. The dull ache of poison pulsed through my limbs. But then the spines were all out, and we were in their Volvo driving back to the house on Berger Street. That night, as a treat, we got to eat spaghetti in the bath, the warm water soothing all the places that would turn into scars. I still remember the thrill of it, the pleasure of the suds and slippery red noodles that we probably dropped into the water, letting them loose like eels into our little marine sanctuary.

Michael died a few years later in a freak accident. He went to the dentist and, woozy from the drugs, fainted in the parking lot, hitting his head on the pavement and dying from a brain hemorrhage. We were nine. At the memorial, we sang “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” and Luke was silent. But as we sat outside the church, he picked up a piece of grass and smudged it onto the knee of my clean white pants, smiling. With that simple gesture, that green stain, I knew he would survive this, that our friendship would survive this.

But I was wrong; he was never really okay again.



Violet-green Swallow
Song: single notes or series of dry, sharp notes with an electric quality, like laser guns
Call: loud chipping notes, chip-lip

Chris is explaining the difference between the calls of Violet-green Swallows and Northern Rough-winged Swallows as we try to follow their erratic flights across the surface of the pond. Every now and then, I see a glint of green and purple on the back or a white rump that tells me it’s a Violet-green, or I clearly see that it’s a little chunkier and has a dark wash to the upper breast and know it’s a Northern Rough-winged. But mostly I just make myself dizzy trying to follow their acrobatic flights as they catch insects above the water.

The Violet-greens have a more electronic call, like high-pitched laser tag, while the Northern Rough-winged Swallows have a more liquid sound. And then Chris offers the best mnemonic device of all: “Northern Rough-winged calls sound kind of like wet farts,” and people laugh. Now I can clearly hear their short, liquid bursts of sound and how different they are from the chirping of the Violet-greens.

It is hilarious or surprising analogies like this one that help me memorize bird vocalizations. Chris is always stressing that we have to come up with our own ways of remembering the sounds, but I find his tricks pretty helpful. It’s surprisingly hard to create phonetic transliterations of bird noises. I wish all birds were named after their vocalizations, like chickadees, but alas we have dozens of birds branded with the last names of white men: Swainson, MacGillivray, Townsend. Thankfully, there has been a reckoning recently. In 2023, after many years of deliberation, the American Ornithological Society decided to rename all 152 North American birds and 111 South American birds named after people. We’ll see what new names emerge in the coming years.

Luckily, Violet-green Swallows are aptly named for their beautiful green and purple backs. They have white throats and bellies and also white that comes over the sides of the rump and is a telling field mark. They are usually found near water, and I remember the first time I identified them. We were on a Prescott College field trip to the Santa Cruz River in the Sonoran Desert, and from our vantage point on the trail that descended into the river valley, we saw the swallows from above, their moss-green backs with accents of sparkling amethyst glinting in the bright desert sun. Today with Chris, we mostly see them from below, white bellies and dark wings surfing the air above the pond.

Luke was elegant, graceful, and quick as the swallows. His slim body was always flowing through some dance routine or playing sports with a dainty finesse. He loved water. It seems like we spent entire summers without ever leaving the pool at his house. He could hold his breath all the way to the deep end and back, and we spent hours playing games involving breathwork contests and also rehearsing the water dances he choreographed to pop songs.

In the spring of 2024, he was in Mexico, on his way to the beach to walk Gizmo, his French Bulldog. Somehow he lost control of the car, ended up in the wrong lane, and was hit by an oncoming truck. Was he distracted? Fiddling with his phone, trying to find a certain song?

Violet-green Swallows nest in tree cavities created by woodpeckers or naturally occurring holes in snags. They spend the winter in Mexico, where they are called Golondrinas verdemar, “sea-green swallows.” Tachycineta thalassina is their Latin name--tachycineta meaning “fast moving,” and thalassina meaning “of the sea.” Fast-moving sprite of the sea is exactly how I would describe Luke.

Santa Fe, our hometown, is full of him. I drive by the toy store we went to as kids that is now a shipping service. Our mutual obsession with Beanie Babies probably kept that toy store in business for a decade. I remember his favorite restaurants, the ones that allowed smoking on the patio and how he perched there over green chile burritos, a cigarette dangling from his elegant fingers.

In high school, he transformed from an effeminate boy into a very cool teenager who smoked lots of weed and did drugs. The slim boy who liked to play dress-up was still in there, but he was putting on a masterful performance of being straight. He was shy but whip-smart, good at sports, and popular. He befriended girls easily. But he was haunted by the death of his stepdad. The summer between high school and college, he almost died of an overdose and came out as gay shortly after. We stayed close in our early twenties when he was at school in Canada and I was in Arizona, reuniting during the holidays and summers. But we began drifting apart, mostly because he was so bad at staying in touch. He attended law school in Denver and stayed there. I would let him know when I was driving through, and he would either warmly invite me to stay with him or ignore me completely. He eloped shortly after gay marriage became legal but never made the effort to introduce me to his husband, which bothered me. Our lives had diverged too much, it seemed, and I was tired of reaching out and hearing radio silence.

My favorite picture of us is from eighth grade. It is sepia toned, and we are illuminated against a black background. Luke stands to my right, slightly taller, our heads touching. My white soccer jersey (which I probably stole from him) is bright, and I’m smiling wide, unselfconscious of my braces. He looks just like I remember him from childhood: freckles, thick curly hair, straight eyebrows, a trickster half-smile on his lips—he played Loki in our fourth grade play, the perfect role for him. You can’t see the color of his eyes, but I would classify them as violet-green.

Blue-gray Gnatcatcher
Song: thin, wheezy notes in a steady series, interspersed with high chips and slurs
Call: nasal buzz, sheer or jeef

To the right of the trail, the Blue-gray Gnatcatchers are flitting around in the willows, tricking us into thinking they are Bushtits. The two species look similar, mostly because they are both delightfully tiny and move so fast it’s hard to get a good look. When I finally do, I see the cloudy blue color on the back and the black and white markings on the tail. Chris explains that, along with Bushtits, the Blue-gray Gnatcatchers are the smallest birds we have here besides hummingbirds, weighing only five grams.

As kids, Luke and I both had asthma, and phrases like “wheezing,” “asthma attack,” and “Albuterol inhaler” were a normal part of our lexicon. My asthma was mostly sports related, but his was more severe and often brought on by dog or cat hair. It was a reason neither of us should have smoked, but we were teenagers. Not bound by reason.

If we had a song, it would be “Wild World” by Cat Stevens. If we had a call, it would be a wheezy trill.

Once in high school, Luke and I did mushrooms at my house. Time passed and we didn’t feel much, so we decided to slip out my bedroom window and smoke weed on the roof. When my dad smelled it, he came upstairs and reprimanded us. It was the first time I had been caught smoking weed, and although my dad wasn’t livid, he also wasn’t going to let us just smoke openly at the house. We decided to drive into town. (Luke had always been scared of my dad for some reason, and my dad never broke through his shy exterior. Perhaps it all stemmed from when we used to watch Star Wars during sleepovers, and on the way to bed my dad would pop out on the landing with his Yoda mask on, sending us back down the stairs screaming.) Luke had smoked more than I had and asked me to drive his car. All the way into town, I felt incredibly relaxed in the driver’s seat, like the car was driving itself. At the intersection of St. Francis and Cerrillos, I looked over at Luke and saw that he was sitting upright in the passenger seat, intent on the road. “I feel like you’re driving . . .  ” I said. “Me too,” he replied. The mushrooms had brought out what had always been true between us—the physical boundaries of the world didn’t stop us from melding into one consciousness. Luke and Laura. LukeandLaura. LLLLLL.

Although on some level I think I always knew that Luke was gay, in sixth grade I decided that we should date. I didn’t see why our closeness couldn’t translate into romance. I asked him out when we were swimming, me sitting on the side of the pool and him in the water. I remember an uncomfortable smile flitting across his face before he dived under and stayed there for a long time. When he finally surfaced, he agreed, and we were a couple for about a week. I don’t remember how we “broke up,” but it wasn’t dramatic, just a simple backtrack to our old friendship. He dated lots of other girls starting in middle school, but I think with me he couldn’t fake it, couldn’t put on the straight facade. I was content to be his best friend and always defended his straightness, saying that he was just unique. When he came out to me at age eighteen over the phone while I was at college, I felt foolish for having believed his charade for so many years. But I was glad he finally felt brave enough to be his true self.

When his little sister called to tell me he had died, I was making breakfast on a beautiful spring morning, the front door open. As she said, “I have some bad news,” her voice broke, and I instantly thought of Luke in a hospital somewhere, gravely injured but alive. For that fraction of a second before she continued, I even felt a little thrill of joy that she had called me and that perhaps this near-death experience would be the impetus Luke and I needed to rekindle our friendship for good. Simultaneously, my dog, Cassidy, ran outside and started barking at someone walking by. I ran outside, calling for her to come back. Cassidy also happened to be Luke’s middle name, so when his sister said, “Luke passed away,” I was calling out for him. Then everything stopped, and I heard a weak “What?” issue from my mouth. As she told me the details, I fought back tears, waiting until we hung up to break into rolling sobs over the kitchen table. Cassidy watched me, bewildered, as I spent the rest of the day on the couch in tears.

His sister must have known that I harbored some resentment and anger toward him for his distance because she said that he loved me but that he had always struggled with mental health and often did not respond to people, even her and his mom. It was the first time it really sank in for me. His life seemed so put together in some ways that it was easy to interpret his distance as lack of care, but now I know it was a sign of distress. The last text message that hangs between us is a birthday message I sent him a year before he died that went unanswered.

But we had one last reunion. After many years of not speaking, Luke reached out during the pandemic and said six words that echo now: “I was worried you had died.” I knew then that he had that same sense of regret at losing such a close friendship, that he thought about me often. I bet he thought, just like me, that we would reunite when we were fifty or so and make up for lost time. I bet he thought we had all the time in the world. Now I’m the one left worrying about all the time we wasted, all the things left unsaid.

The fall after he reached out, I made plans to see him in Denver when I was there visiting my grandma. I got to see his house and meet Gizmo. His husband wasn’t there, and Luke told me he was staying in an apartment at the moment; it sounded like their marriage was on the rocks, but Luke said they kept coming back together because they missed each other. He showed me all the landscaping he had done himself, all the trees he had planted, the two beehives he had. He said I could stay in his guest room anytime. Then we went out to lunch, and he drove, just like in the old days. I’m so glad I bought him lunch that day—it was the last time I saw him, fall of 2021. He died two and a half years later.

As I listen to the wheezy song of the Blue-gray Gnatcatchers, I think we may have seen them once together. One summer in our early twenties, we drove to Cañoncito, a little canyon with a creek twenty minutes east of Santa Fe, and walked down the railroad tracks to the waterhole. Blue-gray Gnatcatchers favor the scrubby riparian vegetation by the creek, and we may have seen a pair flitting around in the willows, fanning and waving their tails. That day, we swam in the waterhole, sliding down the natural shoot from the higher pool to the lower one, sunning ourselves on the red rocks afterward. In retrospect, it was a perfect day. How is it that all my memories of him are now a finite collection?



Hanging from a little mirror in my apartment’s entryway is a Curve-billed Thrasher egg. A few years ago, I found two eggs tossed out of the nest, pale blue and spattered with tiny brown speckles. I used a pin to poke a hole in the top and bottom, and then gently blew out the yolks, a trick I had learned as a child when making Easter eggs. One egg broke during this process, but the other stayed intact. I threaded a piece of string through and hung it from the mirror with a piece of tape.

This world crushes so many delicate things.

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LAURA GRACE HITT is a writer and naturalist based in Santa Fe, NM. She holds an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University. Her work has appeared in the Santa Fe Reporter, Alligator Juniper, Slush Pile, Plain China, the Adventure Scientists blog, and the National Geographic Voices blog. She enjoys birding, podcasts, and staring off into space. Find out more at lauragracehitt.com.


VOLUME 58 No. 4